and nobody would have noticed him pass. Now, at twenty-seven, he
looked back over the five years since his graduation from college
and wondered what he had done with them; and at the four previous
years of undergraduate life and wondered how he had done so well
with those and why he had not in some manner justified the parting
words of his favorite professor.

"You have one rare faculty, Jones. You can, when you choose,
sharpen the pencil of your mind to a very fine point. Specialize,
my boy, specialize."

If the recipient of this admonition had specialized in anything, it
was in life. Having twenty-five thousand a year of his own he might
have continued in that path indefinitely, but for two influences.
One was an irruptive craving within him to take some part in the
dynamic activities of the surrounding world. The other was the
"freak" will of his late and little-lamented uncle, from whom he had
his present income, and his future expectations of some ten
millions. Adrian Van Reypen Egerton had, as Waldemar once put it,
"--one into the mayor's chair with a good name and come out with a
block of ice stock." In a will whose cynical humor was the topic of
its day, Mr. Egerton jeered posthumously at the public which he had
despoiled, and promised restitution, of a sort, through his heir.

"Therefore," he had written, "I give and bequeath to the said Adrian
Van Reypen Egerton Jones, the residue of my property, the principal
to be taken over by him at such time as he shall have completed five
years of continuous residence in New York City. After such time the
virus of the metropolis will have worked through his entire being.
He will squander his unearned and undeserved fortune, thus